Commissions continue, this one from Ko-fi contributor Parkmap. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.
Sometimes, it is hard to totally grasp what a commission for a review is asking for. Given that this was a first-time order (I believe) and that the other matches chosen were good picks, I tend to believe this was not ill-intentioned, as opposed to picking, like, Seth Rollins vs. The Fiend for example. If this came from somebody I knew more or talked to a lot about wrestling, I would believe this pick came with some glee and a little hostility (towards me or towards the match? hard to say), but it doesn’t, so who knows?
Even if it did come from someone I knew trying to punish me with it, the joke is on them.
Really and truly, I do not hate this match.
I definitely used to.
That sentence, that I don’t hate it, might be a shocker to some longer term readers or even a few I would call friends from online, because I HATED this for a long time. In retrospect, I think what I really hated was everything around the match. The manufactured feeling around it. Obviously, all wrestling is manufactured to some extent, but this always felt like they had decided on a Great Match and worked backwards from there. The match itself, at the time, was also sold as this pre-ordained classic, before it ever happened. It is hardly the first time you can note for something like that in the history of wrestling, but in real time, it was the first time I had really noticed that, and as someone who at the time was beginning to discover other wrestling and like the WWE less and less both in concept and practice, it really really rubbed me the wrong way. For every time I’ve ever written or suggested that a reaction to a match, the “why did you like it THAT much?” part, had ever caused me to dislike a match more than it maybe deserved, this was the first time in my life I ever experienced that feeling, and it will always, even as a little bit that fades as times goes on, be a part of this match to me.
What doesn’t help is that the match is far from flawless.
The problems of the match are not always super obvious, but they are there. Some are more obvious, of course. The manufactured Pre-Determined Epic nature of the last third of the thing, the phony theatrics of a Shawn Michaels performance that constantly wanders back and forth between good selling and hammy bullshit, Shawn lasting like two or three minutes in the final Ankle Lock, which itself is perfectly emblematic of the larger problem where I am just never going to connect with a match that ever asks me to feel bad for Shawn Michaels. Some are less obvious, and revealed themselves more to me on this viewing than my last, like the weird construction of the thing. The transition from the early matwork to Angle in control feels like it skips ahead three to five minutes and on top of that, the transition feels real choppy too, in a way that has an effect on the rest of the match. That bell, the idea that something felt off and like they clearly just leapt into the next section, is the sort of thing that cannot be unrung, as the match (most matches) can never turn it back around once the seams — the idea that this is a performance — get opened up like that.
Kurt Angle vs. Shawn Michaels is a good match though.
It might even be a great one.
What works best about this match is the big picture stuff.
The idea that Shawn would outwrestle Angle is often criticized by people who hate this as much as I did at the time it happened, but in the context of Kurt Angle in the WWE, I actually like it. Angle has his credentials, but it is a long established thing — going back to Benoit and Austin and others — that Angle struggles with traditional back and forth pro wrestling matwork. Headlocks and armbars, like Shawn uses early on. Angle can come up with counters and escapes, as he does very very well here, but he struggles with the sorts of things he never really learned. It’s a fine line to walk, and I think other matches walked it better, but there’s some consistency and foundation to it, the idea that Angle’s technique is best put to use when firmly in control, either as a feature of his arrogance (struggling when really challenged) or of his quicker route to the top.
Another great aspect of this, narratively speaking, is that the real struggle is Kurt Angle against himself. As the one who challenges Shawn on the mat and gets too annoyed to do anything but bait him into a bomb throwing contest to get out, or as the guy so intent on making a point that he often gives up the lead to do so, Kurt is his own worst enemy in the match. It’s only when he adjusts and adapts, when he goes to the thing that actually works in the ankle locks and huge bombs to focus on the hurt back, that he’s able to succeed. Performance wise, Angle is really really good at communicating this. The frustration and petty anger, the aggression in control, all of it. It’s the sort of thing that in modern WWE would have 200 close ups and take another ten minutes to get across, but in 2005, got to just be, to his and the match’s benefit.
Shawn is also not awful here.
His early matwork is nice, his selling of the back is mostly good (including one great moment where he slips just a little bit on a crossbody dive to sell it) when he isn’t playing to some fictional 5000th back row, and he lays it in a lot more than usual. The chops are always good enough, but his punches look better here, and there’s one especially hard clothesline that borders on a Lariat. As a confirmed and proud 2000s Shawn Hater, it’s the sort of performance that while not his best of the decade, is the sort of thing I wish he showed far more of.
The match is also — relative to WWE epics, especially what comes after this — pretty well put together, outside of some of the transitions from block to block. It escalates very well, there is far less wasted space than I remembered or that you may remember, and while the final ankle lock bit lasts obscenely long, I don’t think the match itself is too long. The last third is all your fireworks, but the fireworks make sense, within what the match established. A lot of it is, for sure, the old idea that so much of what’s come since is bad enough that this thing, now also old, feels better in retrospect, but I think it works.
Kurt goes back to the ankle locking, and after roughly 82% of the match spent in the last ankle lock, Shawn gives up.
It’s still flawed. I still really do not love it. But I no longer hate it, especially not in the way I hate something like their iron man match later in the year, and as long as the praise is a little more sensible, it’s no longer really a match I have any interest in fighting about. Even if I never fall in love with it, every time I watch this match, I like it just a little bit more, and that’s more than I can say for a lot of great or supposedly great wrestling matches.
Kurt Angle vs. Shawn Michaels is exactly good enough, that in the right mood, I might even call it borderline great.
This is that right mood.
gentleman’s three boy
HANDWERK 